“300 Afro-American Performers”
The Great Cuba Pageant of 1898 and the Struggle for Civil Rights
by Dave Riehle
This article was printed in the St. Paul, Minnesota, publication Ramsey County History (Winter 1999), which identified the author as follows: “Dave Riehle is a locomotive engineer who has written frequently on Minnesota labor history for the St. Paul Union Advocate and other publications. His article on Charles James, an early African-American union leader in St. Paul, was chosen as ‘Best Human Interest Story’ in 1997 by the International Labor Communications Association [ILCA].”
Just over one hundred years ago the United States went to war with Spain after the battleship USS Maine sank in Havana harbor. What actually caused the explosion that scuttled the Maine has been intermittently debated, but never resolved. The four-month-long official war quickly receded to a blip in American memory, along with the brutal pacification of the Philippines by U.S. soldiers that followed in 1899.
Mark Twain’s searing denunciation of U.S. “pirate-raids in…the Philippines”1 was not reprinted for decades. The complex forces that contended in and around the war were quickly forgotten in the United States, although they remained a smoldering memory for many Cubans and Filipinos in the century that followed. Left in American popular consciousness are Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders charging up San Juan Hill, Admiral Dewey’s squadron, the legacy of soldiers’ statues standing silently in countless city parks and village squares throughout this country, and not much else. Perhaps one benefit of the observation of the centennial of the Spanish American war will be a renewed awareness of the many elements that intersected so intensely a century ago.
At the end of the nineteenth century, the advances African Americans had made following the Civil War in personal and political freedoms were being relentlessly driven back. Two decades after the federal government’s abandonment of Reconstruction in 1876, Jim Crow legislation was codifying segregation in all spheres of life. Southern Blacks were being disenfranchised by means of legislation and extra-legal terrorism.2 With the Supreme Court’s 1896 decision in Plessy vs Ferguson upholding segregated railroad accommodations in Louisiana, it was clear that inequality was ordained as national policy.
Each setback was chronicled with burning indignation by St. Paul’s outstanding African American newspaper, The Appeal.3 As African Americans all across the country sought ways to resist and reverse this counterrevolution the active and well-educated leadership of the St. Paul, Minnesota, African American community collaborated in efforts to develop new national civil rights organizations and created their own locally based initiatives.4
The U.S. declaration of war against Spain in April 1898 initially offered a glimmer of hope to beleaguered African Americans. Cuban patriots had begun a renewed struggle for independence from Spain several years prior to the U.S. declaration of war. To see the United States ostensibly intervening on the side of the predominantly Afro-Cuban population in their battle for democracy and independence implied to some, and not only to Blacks, that the American government might again champion the cause of U.S. citizens of African descent. Some white supremacists, such as the widow of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, condemned the war as an expedition on behalf of the “miserable mulatto race” of revolutionary Cubans.5
African American hopes for change and progress were extinguished over time, as invading Americans brought their virulent white racism along with them to the relatively integrated society of Cuba, and U.S. armed forces crushed the independence movement in the Philippine Islands.6
But at first there was almost euphoria as African Americans in St. Paul and elsewhere embraced all things Cuban with great enthusiasm, expressed in a variety of ways in almost every issue of the Appeal.
Mrs. J.Q. Adams hosted a “Cuban tea” at her home with 75 present.7 The “Santiago Glee club” presented a concert program by talented African Americans at St. Paul’s Mozart Hall.8 An advertisement asked “Will We C-U-B-A- Masquer at the Party?”9African Americans focused great enthusiasm and admiration on the figure of the great Afro-Cuban revolutionary Antonio Maceo.10 Known as the “Bronze Titan,” Maceo, still revered in Cuba today as a national hero, as he has been for over a century, was the second-in-command of the Cuban army of independence. The image and example of Maceo sank deep roots in the African American community. Looking at a front-page portrait of “General Antonio Maceo,” with his clearly African features, in the June 18, 1898, issue of the Appeal, one can almost feel an electric current.
From that time forward “Maceo” has been a familiar given name for African American males, although entirely absent from the non-Hispanic white community.11 For example, two outstanding St. Paul union leaders, Maceo Finney and Maceo Littlejohn, were both born at the turn of the century. Even the female “Maceola” made an appearance.12 For years, advertisements appeared in Twin Cities African American newspapers for the “Maceo Club” in Minneapolis.
According to Cuban-American writer José Yglesias, “Maceo was not and is not known by Americans — but he was known by blacks in the terrible Reconstruction years, particularly by Southern blacks who had few safe opportunities to express their pride in themselves. They named their boys Maceo and gave it the American pronunciation: May-see-oh. This was a secret pleasure and today there are American blacks who do not know how they have come to be named Maceo.”13
While elected African American office holders in the South were being steadily eliminated through disenfranchisement of African American voters, others, who held office by federal appointment, were removed by lynching and mob violence. In February 1898 a white mob assaulted and burned the U.S. post office at Lake City, South Carolina. Postmaster Frazier Baker and his infant child were burned alive in the fire and his wife and daughter were shot and maimed by the attackers.14 African American post masters, appointed by Republican administrations, were particular targets for white retaliation, not only as holders of important positions in the community, but because the post offices served as the distribution points for Northern Black newspapers, which exposed and condemned the crimes committed in the mounting assault on African Americans.
A large community protest meeting in response to this sickening assault was held at St. Paul’s Pilgrim Baptist Church shortly afterward, chaired by attorney Frederick McGhee.15 Resolutions were passed denouncing the barbaric murders and calling upon the federal government to identify and prosecute the perpetrators. The meeting bitterly condemned the government’s failure to intervene against lynching, even when, as here, a federal institution was directly assaulted.16 “Since the 4th day of March, 1897, 149 Afro-American17 citizens have suffered cruel deaths at the hands of Southern mobs, but not one of the participants has been apprehended or punished by the government…Frazier B. Baker died bravely at his post in the performance of his duty as a man and an officer of the government he served; which was duty bound to protect him.”
The “temporizing and subservient policy of the administration” in refusing to act was condemned, and President McKinley was called upon to seek legislation giving “colored citizens and colored officials of the United States the fair and equal protection of the laws.” To that end a call was adopted for a “state-wide convention of Afro-Americans” in the near future.
The resulting American Law Enforcement League of Minnesota proclaimed that “we are tens of millions of people with heart enough, with brain enough, and with arms long and strong enough — if the forces they represent be combined — to move the world.”18
“We have resolved,” the League said in a statement distributed to the delegates of a national Baptist convention in Kansas City that year, “that Jim Crow must go, that inferior accommodations with first class fare is unjust and discriminating; that the recent revision of its Constitution by the Legislature of Mississippi, disenfranchising Negroes, be appealed; that the 14th and 15th Amendments be enforced both in letter and in spirit…”
The officers of the organization, whose names were attached to the statement, included African American attorney W.R. Morris, J.Q. Adams, Frank Wheaton, who would be elected to the Minnesota state legislature in November, and 32-year old recording secretary Charles James, who a year later would begin a long and remarkable career as a Minnesota union leader.
In November of 1898 African Americans in St. Paul carried out an astonishingly ambitious project designed to raise funds for the League, which identified its cause with the war in Cuba, and, more subtly, with the subtext of that war, the struggle of a people of African descent for their freedom and independence.19
Written and managed by Mrs. Cora Pope, the wife of a Black U.S. army veteran, the production placed hundreds of talented African Americans on stage to sing, act, dance, cakewalk, and declaim a pageant of solidarity with Cuba and freedom. At its climax was a speech by Frederick McGhee in the character of General Maceo, who “recounted the wrongs of his country, and called upon his followers to avenge them.”20
To achieve the widest support and acceptance within the entire community, and no doubt to enhance the success of the fund-raising goals, the organizers sought broad endorsement from wealthy families in both Minneapolis and St. Paul, as well as even broader support and participation from the African American community. The organizers chose to make the supporters of record entirely female. They were divided into two groups, “Honorary Patronesses” (white) and “Active Patronesses” (African American), and both, in the usage of the time, were identified by their husband’s names. The two groups were composed of the elite of the respective communities. The African Americans listed are familiar to those acquainted with the early history of the community — names such as Hilyard, Hickman, Adams, McGhee, and Francis, as well as many others. The white honorary patronesses included members of the Pillsbury, Northrup, Peavey, Lowry, and Weyerhaeuser families.21
The program was performed first at the Lyceum Theater in Minneapolis on November 3 and 4, and then at the Metropolitan Opera House in St Paul on the evening of November 10. Advertised as “Cuba — A Drama of Freedom…benefit of the American League of Minnesota…with Music, Art, Drama, Comedy — 300 Afro-American performers — Grand, Beautiful, Patriotic,” it included a cakewalk and the Marseilles, “Der Wacht am Rhein” sung in German, Liberty and her maids, and a depiction of battle in Cuba, among other things.
The program was divided into four acts: the first, a pageant in which Liberty and her maidens carried compassion to Cuba, along with flower girls and women in armor, then sail to Spain and plead for the island’s oppressed subjects. Then, in successive acts, a depiction of life in Cuba, with snapshots of life in the sugar fields, singing and dancing “by Cubans and Negroes” coming home from the plantation fields, the formation of revolutionary conspiracy in the hills led by Maceo, and then the battle of Santiago and the American victory. Finally, delegations of the nations of the world gather for a celebration of freedom in the new Republic of Cuba. The response to the pageant was so positive that several encore performances were held later in the month.
Clearly the production represented an intersection of many levels of consciousness. Somehow, “Uncle Rasmus” and “Sambo” made an appearance on the Cuban plantation, along with revolutionary generals Maceo and Gomez. What was presumed to be the liberating power and benign intentions of the U.S. expeditionary force stood alongside McGhee’s pointed speech about the righteous vengeance of the oppressed.22
The tensions inherent in this melange of disparate artistic, cultural, and political themes emerged soon after in a prolonged debate over the producers’ decision to insert the “cakewalk” into the program. The primary critic was journalist J.C. Reid. In 1899 Reid became the editor of another Twin Cities African American newspaper, the Minneapolis Afro-American Advance, formed out of the merger of two other Black newspapers, and forcefully expressed views similar to those he articulated in this debate.23
The public “naturally expected ‘intellectual brilliancy’ to shine as it did never before in the Northwest,” Reid wrote. “And the performers did credit to themselves from the above point of view, with one exception, which caused the whole to pass into history as an unpolished affair.”24 That exception, Reid said, was the “cake walk.”25
“There is no need for outlining the moral, social and intellectual value the public places upon the ‘cake walk,’” he said. “While it enjoys it, its innermost thoughts are: ‘all coons are alike.’”
Reid argued that “frivolity” such as the cakewalk only reinforced stereotypes of all Blacks as an improvident people “who live only to amuse and to be amused.” Situating his argument in the recent savage mob assaults on Southern Blacks, Reid expressed both a sense that the African American had to demonstrate to the dominant white society that his literate and cultured social group — “All of us who are regarded to be lights among us” — deserved to be accepted as equals. At the same time Reid voiced a bitter frustration at the unanswered murders in the South. In an unmistakable reference to another recent Southern atrocity, Reid’s anger boiled over:
“The memory of our brothers who are being butchered daily in the South should ever be green, for the deadly odor of the so-called justified crimes committed in the South is slowly but surely setting the whites of the North against us…When the Afro-American in the south learns the power of individuality they will not submit to being tied up in bunches and shot to death as they did recently without taking a few white `friends’ along with them to the next world.”26
Two writers, both women who had participated in the pageant, answered Reid’s criticism the following week. Although it could be “vulgarized just as any other form of amusement may be,” the cakewalk was described as a “brilliant, grace-displaying art form,” and one which white socialites had adopted at their own social functions. In fact, according to one of the letter writers, Mrs. Frederick McGhee, “refined and cultured” African Americans had only undertaken to cakewalk after “society people” (whites) with centuries of “morals, education, property and refinement” had done so. “We are all aware that the cakewalk has its associations [but] the writer of this article never knew of its coming into prominence until Mr. W.K. Vanderbilt gave a ‘cakewalk’ at his home in New York City.”27
“The cake walk,” Mattie McGhee argued, “has been placed on a standard with other dances, and now that it has, if it is proving such a ‘calamity’ to the race with which it will forever be identified, we would suggest that a few attacks be made on Mr. Vanderbilt for leading us into temptation.”
Besides, she reminded him, the whole production was created to “add to the prosperity of the American Law Enforcement League.”
“I would add,” she concluded, “that the production of ‘Cuba’ has done more to elevate the colored people in the estimation of the whites in the Northwest than all the combined efforts of the race-loving people of the Twin Cities, for the participants didn’t meet, elect officers and resolve, and then dissolve, but they went to work and by their combined efforts gave a performance that has excelled by far any of its kind ever given by those who acknowledge themselves our superior race.”
The debate did not end here. Reid replied in the next issue of the Appeal that he was surprised that Mattie McGhee did not agree with him. Even though the participants were “the moral and intellectual lights among local Afro-Americans,” Reid did not see any difference between a cake walk by “the colored 400" and those of less prominence. The problem, he said, was that ”no white man ever looked at a cake walk unless he thought of its origin. Our unfortunate ancestors amused their masters in the hated ante-bellum days with the cake walk…It is reasonable to think that when the Negro amuses our enlightened peers that everything connected with ante-bellum days darts like lightning through their heart and brain. What we want to do is put down everything that was ever connected with slavery. We want to forget those days and not forever parade them before the public." No progress will come from “imitating the white man,” Reid argued, or by “grinning, joking and closed eyes…We will have to create our own examples if we expect to be an honored and respected race.”28
Reid then closed by suggesting that it was “imprudent” of him to continue his debate with women, and that further discussion should be among males. His suggestion was answered promptly in the Appeal‘s next issue by Mattie McGhee, who told him that she felt “able to hold her own” in the discussion, and was quite willing to carry on with the debate. However, in view of Reid’s expressed reluctance, Frederick McGhee volunteered to participate in a public debate.29
The literary debate went on in subsequent issues. Reid’s other opponent in the original exchange, a high school student named Marie Armstrong, upbraided him for dismissing her as a mere schoolgirl. Even though she was “simply a student,” there was no doubt on her part that she also could “hold her own without appealing to the legislature.”30
Finally, in early February Reid and McGhee debated the question “Is the ‘Cakewalk’ Detrimental to the Afro-American?” before a large crowd at Bethesda church in Minneapolis. The nine judges appointed for the occasion decided that McGhee had presented his view in a more able manner and awarded the contest to him.31
No further public debate seems to have occurred. The underlying issue, of course, was not and could not be resolved. Whether to accommodate to the dominant white society or to organize independently could be stated, abstractly, as clear alternatives. In life, such a differentiation was infinitely more complicated. Reid’s and McGhee’s arguments each palpably contained elements of both. In a microcosm they expressed the same dilemma personified in the two African American poles of attraction and opposition of that time, W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Frederick McGhee himself was far from being an accommodationist of the Washington type, and in fact was a key collaborator of Du Bois in organizing the Niagara movement, the forerunner to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
It would be presumptuous in the extreme to attempt to pass judgment on the choices made by these fellow citizens one hundred years ago. Under relentless political, economic, social, and psychological pressures, they sought to survive and find a way forward within the circumstances in which they found themselves. The people who organized and participated in the great Cuba pageant by and large accepted the values of the dominant society as legitimate, with the exception of the sea of irrational race prejudice in which they were always immersed. Stripped of political rights and reduced to virtual peonage in the South, isolated from a hostile or indifferent labor movement, and existing only in relatively small numbers in Northern cities, it must have been often hard to see any possible amelioration of their status other than to seek grudging acceptance from the white elite. Even so, the veins of another tradition always ran through this pattern of conciliation and accommodation. The existence of St. Paul organizations such as Nat Turner Lodge No. 2 of the Knights of Pythias, the John Brown Memorial Association, and the Toussaint L’Ouverture Dramatic Club all testified to another awareness.
The fate of others in the African diaspora was never far away from the consciousness of African Americans, and an awareness of the centuries-old legacy of struggle had deep roots. From the middle of the 19th century into at least the late 1930s, the anniversary of the 1837 emancipation of African slaves in the British West Indies was commemorated every August in St. Paul, and undoubtedly elsewhere as well. It is hardly necessary to mention the numerous acknowledgements of the revolutionary self-emancipation of Haiti.32
Not for the first or last time, developments from beyond the borders of the United States gave African Americans new hope, and showed them the possibility of hitherto unconsidered allies. Just as the colonial revolutions following World War II gave renewed impetus to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s, the struggle of a predominantly African people in the Caribbean in the 1890s aroused new confidence, energy, and determination in African Americans in the United States at perhaps the nadir of their existence following the Civil War. It was unmistakably the inspiration of the Afro-Cuban revolutionary struggle which galvanized the unprecedented effort that was the Cuba pageant. At a time when the entire African American population of St. Paul was probably less than 2,000, organizing and rehearsing over 300 performers on stage, and attracting hundreds or thousands more in the audiences, was an amazingly successful accomplishment.33 It seems evident that the activities of the American Law Enforcement League, and the earlier Minnesota Afro-American League, founded in 1892, especially as expressed in the person of Frederick McGhee, must have contributed to the body of experience drawn on in the formation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1910, and its predecessor, the Niagara Movement, in which McGhee played a large part.34
The Cuba pageant has been forgotten for a century.35 Even though it is ultimately only an episode in the history of a people and a city, the story is a tribute to the creativity and tenacity of those who saw the opportunity to intervene in a new situation in order to advance their own interests and who had the audacity and ability to do so.